Cleaning up the Horde
In the transition from Warcraft II to Warcraft III, Blizzard took the Orcish Horde in a brand-new direction: where once they were simple Bad Guys, now they were morally complex Good Guys. This is an interesting direction to take... but I've always boggled at the way Blizzard went about it.
Let's go over the Horde's species, so I can tell you why I boggle.
Warcraft II
The Horde is, broadly speaking, assumed to be evil, but the game only makes a strong effort to reinforce this interpretation when it comes to the Orcs themselves. Specifically...
Ogres: Ogres are dumb as a sack of rocks and are used by the Orcs as muscle and not much else. Ogres who have been transformed into Ogre Mages are "cunning" and have a lot more brains to work with, but this is a process that occurs at Orcish discretion. At no point does the story, whether within the campaign or in the manual, clarify what Ogres are like when left to their own devices. All we know is that Ogres do what the Orcs tell them to do, and are in fact explicitly stupid, with all intelligent Ogres being indebted to Orcish society.
Due to both a lack of information and what little information we have indicating that Ogres do not necessarily understand what they are participating in, it's difficult to readily class Ogres as Evil with a capital E. For all we know they're a peaceful species when left to their own devices, and are simply sufficiently pliable that the Orcs were able to integrate them without effort. They might not even understand that they are participating in violence, and even if they have that understanding no mechanism is described for how Orcs get Ogres to further Orcish aims. It is entirely possible that Ogres are hapless victims who are only complicit in the Horde's crimes because they don't understand, or because they are being somehow made to do so "at gunpoint" (We know nothing about Ogre family structure -perhaps Orcs hold their children as hostages), or in the case of the Magi out of a sense of gratitude for having been granted their magical intelligence.
So it's entirely possible Ogres are not evil. We don't know.
Goblins: Goblins are strange. They are apparently extraordinarily clever, able to develop literally magical concoctions and produce explosives no Orc could replicate, and yet in most respects they behave like children. It's not even clear whether Goblin Sappers understand that they are going to die, only that they understand that they're going to make some cool explosions. While overall the game provides little information on Goblins, the information it does provide makes it unclear how strong a grasp Goblins have on the full implications of their own actions. Do they know they are participating in a genocidal war on a foreign set of species for no other reason than because that's just how Orcs pass the time?
Just like the Ogres, it's not clear whether Goblins are "independently" evil or if they are only doing evil things because they're buddies with the Orcs and don't know any better. It could go either way.
Trolls: Goblins and Ogres are too child-like and too dumb, respectively, for it to be safely assumed they understand their circumstances, so you might think Trolls have an equivalent handicap. Nope, Trolls are plenty intelligent, Trolls have adult brain functionality, and in fact Trolls have an impressive capacity for large-scale construction projects, as evidenced by how much of the Horde's navy is derived primarily or entirely from Troll efforts.
Does that mean Trolls are obviously evil?
Well...
OK there's two things here. First of all, Trolls are never given any characterization suggesting that they act out of malice, greed, jealousy, or whatever else you care to name. The game doesn't indicate Trolls like to torture people, or kill people, or whatever, for fun or because they hate those guys for no good reason, or whatever. Trolls are not indicated to have a cultural predilection for evil.
The other thing is that Trolls are in competition with the Elves of Quel'thalas. They both live in forests, this is the biggest (Best?) forest around, neither of them wants to leave it for some other, less desirable location, and the Elves have joined the Alliance before Warcraft II even starts. Given the way most alliances work, it's probably reasonable to assume that the Alliance would default to assisting the Elves against the Trolls, rather than just staying out of Quel'thalas business or entertaining the possibility of allying with the Trolls. That puts the Trolls in a bad position -whatever equilibrium has been going on for however long that has prevented the Elves from slaughtering the Trolls or vice-versa is now gone, as the Elves now have access to the collective firepower of the entire Alliance. Even if the Alliance is really about fighting the Orcs and nothing else, for all the Trolls know the Alliance may ignore the Trolls until the Orcs are gone and then wipe out the Trolls, or decide that having Trolls hampering their Elven allies is too inconvenient and wipe them out right now.
That really only leaves the Trolls three options: try to join the Alliance (Which might not even work if the Elves convince the rest of the Alliance to reject them, assuming they aren't rejected automatically for being enemies of an existing Alliance member), flee their ancestral homeland entirely (To where?), or ally with the Horde, since the Horde is the only force comparable to the Alliance that the Trolls know of.
In other words, the Trolls may have joined the Horde entirely to avoid being wiped out entirely. This makes it extremely difficult to make a definitive statement about their morality -yes, they're allied with Orcs, yes Orcs are ridiculously evil in Warcraft II, but then, do the Trolls have any other, more morally palatable options?
The answer is no, they don't.
Dragons: Enslaved by the Orcs. This isn't complicated -Warcraft II indicates that Dragons are horrible monsters that steal princesses and kill people for no good reason, but the idea here isn't one of an alliance of equal, equally evil beings, it's slavery, pure and simple. This places the actions of Dragons within Warcraft II firmly on Orcish shoulders -even if Dragons would be inclined to be evil on their own, that's not why they're participating in the Horde's war.
Orcs: Unlike every other member of the Horde, the Orcs have no excuses or alternate explanations. They're a species of violent thugs who genocide entire species for fun, they beat the crap out of their own kind if they can't find any foreigners to go kill, again for fun, and their leadership entered into a pact with demons because power is good or something. You can't even argue that Orcs are the way they are because of the demonic influence, because they were doing the whole genocide-for-fun thing before demons came into the picture, demonic influence just made them worse. They've in turn recruited -through unclear means- other species into their campaign, invaded another world just to have more things to kill, and on top of all that their internal politics revolve around assassinations.
Orcs are, in short, the only species in Warcraft II that is Evil with a capital E, 100%-for-sure. We don't know how the other species would behave when placed into a context lacking the motives we can see for their current evil-ness: would Ogres be Good if a Paladin had come along and preached about how it's mean to go around hurting things for entertainment? Would the Goblins be innocent if living just among Goblins? We don't know. The Orcs we know for a fact were exterminating entire species for fun before the Burning Legion made contact with them -they are unquestionably horrible, as a species. Not so for their allies, who all have circumstantial reasons for their current behavior, with no way to separate things out and determine what is driven by innate tendencies and what is driven by the situation. Meanwhile, in...
Warcraft III
... we get the previously-mentioned twist that the Horde throws off the demonic influence and becomes a force for good in the world as a whole. Only, when I say the Horde, I actually mean the Orcs. Every other member of the Horde is shed, and... well, just read on.
Ogres: Surprise! Ogres were always intelligent and just pretending to be stupid and just pretending that magically transforming them into Ogre-Magi was bolstering their intelligence and they have, in fact, been biding their time to do... something... evil for their own reasons, because they're evil. Did I mention they're evil? Independently and through no fault of the Horde?
They have of course completely abandoned the Horde, because the Horde isn't evil and they are, I guess.
Goblins: Turns out Goblins aren't childlike and ignorant, they're cunning, shrewd, essentially amoral business-folk. Who now sell their blow-self-up services for a fee. That they cannot possibly spend, what with being dead. OK. Furthermore, they're obviously... not evil, but they're certainly not good, which obviously has nothing to do with the fact at they were allied with the Orcs in the previous war. Really, if this is what Goblins are fundamentally like, how did an Orc/Goblin alliance even occur? Not even getting into how inconsistent, generally, it is with everything we saw in Warcraft II.
The important bit here being that the Goblins are definitively not "good guys", and you can't blame this point on the Orcs at all.
They've also broken away from the Horde entirely, just like the Ogres, with just as little justification ie none.
Trolls: Remember the ambiguous, presumably-evil-but-not-necessarily Trolls of Warcraft II I described above? Well, now they're evil, the end, plus the world is covered in myriad sub-varieties of Trolls that are, of course, also always evil, only wait, there's one tribe in the entire world that isn't evil, and of course our newly-heroic Orcs (Who were always heroic, shut up, they were just misunderstood) happened to run across them while traveling to their destination anyway. These Trolls of course promptly joined the Horde for... no described reason... (The demo for Frozen Throne depicts these events, but there's no point at which it makes sense for the Trolls to join therein: they just do. Because) thus abandoning their ancestral homeland for no particular reason. These Trolls are, in turn, conveniently alchemists (Because Trolls in Warcraft II could be upgraded with Regeneration through alchemy invented by Goblins, and I guess Blizzard couldn't bring themselves to actually abandon regenerative Trolls just because the lore says Trolls with no Goblin affiliation shouldn't have it. Never mind how willing they are to retcon much bigger plotpoints), and make references to a Troll Hero from Quel'thalas -who they should never have heard of, what with being on another continent, on the other side of an ocean no one has ever crossed before the Horde does so in Warcraft III.
The fact that these blue-skinned jungle Trolls are cannibals gets referred to, and then the implications of their morality are promptly ignored. Never mind that the Quel'thalas Trolls never did anything more evil than be a part of the Horde in Warcraft II, these new cannibal Trolls are obviously less evil than the forest Trolls we abandoned. Because they joined the New Horde. I guess.
Leaving aside the baffling decision to remove Trolls (Presumably to distance the Horde from their old, evil allies), replace them with different Trolls so we still have Trolls (Thus botching this attempt at distancing the Horde), and then make the new Trolls engage in an activity few people would describe as moral (Thus completely ruining the entire attempt), this is broadly in line with the prior two species -the Quel'thalas Trolls are evil, but it's not the Horde's fault, they were that way before the Horde showed up, honest, come look at our replacement buddies who are considerably more Good. (The Ogres have been replaced with the Tauren, for instance)
Dragons: This is a bit roundabout. The New Horde does not have Dragons. That's fine, since the old Dragons were slaves, and the new Horde isn't into that kind of thing anymore, what with being redeemed and all. They replace them with "Wyverns", which are supposed to be related to Dragons or something, though really the only similarity is that they both fly, and these Wyverns are supposedly all choosing to work with the Horde of their own volition because... who knows why, I don't actually care.
That's all fine. It's much better handled then the other species, honestly.
But...
Warcraft III also decides to heavily retcon Dragons. In Warcraft II, they were basically wild animals that conformed to various Dragon tropes. (No reference to hording gold, actually, but mostly typical otherwise) Older Dragons seemed to be intelligent, going by the mother-Dragon as well as Deathwing's presence in Beyond the Dark Portal, but overall Dragons seemed to be animals that happened to be particularly dangerous -sort of like a real-world big predator, only moreso. In Warcraft III, they are instead pretty much angels. The beings that built the world constructed them and set them to the task of keeping the order of the world, and that's what they do, with the old mother-Dragon being revealed to be basically a goddess, sacred to a large fraction of Dragon-kind and hideously powerful in her own right, far beyond what being a big fire-breathing reptile would suggest.
There is no backlash for the Horde's crimes against Dragons. "Yeah we kidnapped God/the pope/Buddha/name a holy or divine figure you prefer and turned them into a baby factory so we could use the kids as child-soldier-slaves, and nobody cares." What?
This is the part that bothers me about Dragons, in relation to the Horde. The story ignores the entire thing and lets the Horde off scot-free. Never mind that the Dragons are not forgiving sorts. Never mind that it is well within Momma Dragon's capabilities to torch every Orc alive. Never mind all her children that would be outraged on her behalf, and demand payment in blood. Never mind that Orcs come from an entirely different world, so whatever divine mandates about not hurting the two-legs wouldn't apply because Orcs aren't from the world she and all other Dragons are here to protect, and in fact they tried to kill everyone in it, and were working for the Burning Legion -that is, the people the Dragons are meant to protect this world from, so in addition to the personal grievances she should have with the Orcs her duty should compel her to do something about them.
But no, the Orcs are Good now, so none of the terrible things they did in Warcraft II will have any consequences.
But let's talk about the Orcs themselves for a second!
Orcs: Remember how I talked about the whole "let's genocide everything for fun" thing? How it happened well before the Orcs made any demonic deals? Yeah, not anymore. Now the Orcs were peaceful tribes who were One With Nature before the demons talked to them, at which point their leaders accepted a deal involving drinking Demon blood to turn all Orcs everywhere into bloodthirsty maniacs, leading to them purging various other species in the world. You see, the Orcs aren't evil, they were possessed by outside forces! They'd have gone right on being peaceful hippies until the end of time if it weren't for demonic influence that they invited into their homes and accepted wholeheartedly. Because the Orcs are good, you see. Honest.
This is all kinds of retcons, but my real issue is that the Horde is supposed to be undergoing a redemption arc -they turned evil, it was bad, and nowJesus Thrall is leading them back to The Old Ways, which are traditional, nature-loving, and Good, and they'll never be bad again.
The Point
Warcraft III can't be bothered to cope with any of the consequences of the Horde's actions. Their old allies have gone from being maybe-evil people who are tools of the Orcs, to being evil on their own, no Orc influence at all, honest. The Dragon enslavement thing is being completely ignored, never mind how tremendous the consequences should be. The fact that they butchered their way through much of humanity on one continent and then followed the remainder to another so they could kill everyone there -oh, well, you see... humans are mostly jerks now, as are all the other Alliance members in all honestly, the Horde has a divine mandate from Medivh (He Who Protects Creation -don't think too much about how he's redundant with the Dragons, because Blizzard sure didn't) to promptly run away to a new continent nobody even knows exists. Yeah, there's humans and so on here too, but once they get over their prejudices they ally with the Orcs against the larger threat of demonic invasion, instantly forgiving the whole "genocide" thing.
So the Orcs don't redeem themselves. They just are declared "Good" by the plot and then shuffled off away from everything terrible they did. Bunches of things they could be blamed for -maybe the Ogre's aren't evil, just oblivious?- is not their fault via ludicrous retcon, while other things are just quietly ignored, never to be addressed. This would have been an awesome opportunity to develop the world, but instead the game shoves everything that could hurt the new image of Squeaky Clean Good Guy Orcs into a corner and pretends you can't see it.
I find this a baffling way to handle the whole thing. If you want the bad guys to become good guys, you don't do that by saying they never were bad guys and ignoring the social fallout of their Bad Guy actions. The whole point of running through a redemption arc is that they did bad things, are willing to own up to their actions, and are willing to make changes to become good people. If you strip out the consequences it loses all its weight, and Good Guys who were never bad to begin with and don't need to fear consequences for bad behavior work better if you just invent some new people who were, I dunno, never bad guys.
Why do a redemption arc where no redemption occurs?
Let's go over the Horde's species, so I can tell you why I boggle.
Warcraft II
The Horde is, broadly speaking, assumed to be evil, but the game only makes a strong effort to reinforce this interpretation when it comes to the Orcs themselves. Specifically...
Ogres: Ogres are dumb as a sack of rocks and are used by the Orcs as muscle and not much else. Ogres who have been transformed into Ogre Mages are "cunning" and have a lot more brains to work with, but this is a process that occurs at Orcish discretion. At no point does the story, whether within the campaign or in the manual, clarify what Ogres are like when left to their own devices. All we know is that Ogres do what the Orcs tell them to do, and are in fact explicitly stupid, with all intelligent Ogres being indebted to Orcish society.
Due to both a lack of information and what little information we have indicating that Ogres do not necessarily understand what they are participating in, it's difficult to readily class Ogres as Evil with a capital E. For all we know they're a peaceful species when left to their own devices, and are simply sufficiently pliable that the Orcs were able to integrate them without effort. They might not even understand that they are participating in violence, and even if they have that understanding no mechanism is described for how Orcs get Ogres to further Orcish aims. It is entirely possible that Ogres are hapless victims who are only complicit in the Horde's crimes because they don't understand, or because they are being somehow made to do so "at gunpoint" (We know nothing about Ogre family structure -perhaps Orcs hold their children as hostages), or in the case of the Magi out of a sense of gratitude for having been granted their magical intelligence.
So it's entirely possible Ogres are not evil. We don't know.
Goblins: Goblins are strange. They are apparently extraordinarily clever, able to develop literally magical concoctions and produce explosives no Orc could replicate, and yet in most respects they behave like children. It's not even clear whether Goblin Sappers understand that they are going to die, only that they understand that they're going to make some cool explosions. While overall the game provides little information on Goblins, the information it does provide makes it unclear how strong a grasp Goblins have on the full implications of their own actions. Do they know they are participating in a genocidal war on a foreign set of species for no other reason than because that's just how Orcs pass the time?
Just like the Ogres, it's not clear whether Goblins are "independently" evil or if they are only doing evil things because they're buddies with the Orcs and don't know any better. It could go either way.
Trolls: Goblins and Ogres are too child-like and too dumb, respectively, for it to be safely assumed they understand their circumstances, so you might think Trolls have an equivalent handicap. Nope, Trolls are plenty intelligent, Trolls have adult brain functionality, and in fact Trolls have an impressive capacity for large-scale construction projects, as evidenced by how much of the Horde's navy is derived primarily or entirely from Troll efforts.
Does that mean Trolls are obviously evil?
Well...
OK there's two things here. First of all, Trolls are never given any characterization suggesting that they act out of malice, greed, jealousy, or whatever else you care to name. The game doesn't indicate Trolls like to torture people, or kill people, or whatever, for fun or because they hate those guys for no good reason, or whatever. Trolls are not indicated to have a cultural predilection for evil.
The other thing is that Trolls are in competition with the Elves of Quel'thalas. They both live in forests, this is the biggest (Best?) forest around, neither of them wants to leave it for some other, less desirable location, and the Elves have joined the Alliance before Warcraft II even starts. Given the way most alliances work, it's probably reasonable to assume that the Alliance would default to assisting the Elves against the Trolls, rather than just staying out of Quel'thalas business or entertaining the possibility of allying with the Trolls. That puts the Trolls in a bad position -whatever equilibrium has been going on for however long that has prevented the Elves from slaughtering the Trolls or vice-versa is now gone, as the Elves now have access to the collective firepower of the entire Alliance. Even if the Alliance is really about fighting the Orcs and nothing else, for all the Trolls know the Alliance may ignore the Trolls until the Orcs are gone and then wipe out the Trolls, or decide that having Trolls hampering their Elven allies is too inconvenient and wipe them out right now.
That really only leaves the Trolls three options: try to join the Alliance (Which might not even work if the Elves convince the rest of the Alliance to reject them, assuming they aren't rejected automatically for being enemies of an existing Alliance member), flee their ancestral homeland entirely (To where?), or ally with the Horde, since the Horde is the only force comparable to the Alliance that the Trolls know of.
In other words, the Trolls may have joined the Horde entirely to avoid being wiped out entirely. This makes it extremely difficult to make a definitive statement about their morality -yes, they're allied with Orcs, yes Orcs are ridiculously evil in Warcraft II, but then, do the Trolls have any other, more morally palatable options?
The answer is no, they don't.
Dragons: Enslaved by the Orcs. This isn't complicated -Warcraft II indicates that Dragons are horrible monsters that steal princesses and kill people for no good reason, but the idea here isn't one of an alliance of equal, equally evil beings, it's slavery, pure and simple. This places the actions of Dragons within Warcraft II firmly on Orcish shoulders -even if Dragons would be inclined to be evil on their own, that's not why they're participating in the Horde's war.
Orcs: Unlike every other member of the Horde, the Orcs have no excuses or alternate explanations. They're a species of violent thugs who genocide entire species for fun, they beat the crap out of their own kind if they can't find any foreigners to go kill, again for fun, and their leadership entered into a pact with demons because power is good or something. You can't even argue that Orcs are the way they are because of the demonic influence, because they were doing the whole genocide-for-fun thing before demons came into the picture, demonic influence just made them worse. They've in turn recruited -through unclear means- other species into their campaign, invaded another world just to have more things to kill, and on top of all that their internal politics revolve around assassinations.
Orcs are, in short, the only species in Warcraft II that is Evil with a capital E, 100%-for-sure. We don't know how the other species would behave when placed into a context lacking the motives we can see for their current evil-ness: would Ogres be Good if a Paladin had come along and preached about how it's mean to go around hurting things for entertainment? Would the Goblins be innocent if living just among Goblins? We don't know. The Orcs we know for a fact were exterminating entire species for fun before the Burning Legion made contact with them -they are unquestionably horrible, as a species. Not so for their allies, who all have circumstantial reasons for their current behavior, with no way to separate things out and determine what is driven by innate tendencies and what is driven by the situation. Meanwhile, in...
Warcraft III
... we get the previously-mentioned twist that the Horde throws off the demonic influence and becomes a force for good in the world as a whole. Only, when I say the Horde, I actually mean the Orcs. Every other member of the Horde is shed, and... well, just read on.
Ogres: Surprise! Ogres were always intelligent and just pretending to be stupid and just pretending that magically transforming them into Ogre-Magi was bolstering their intelligence and they have, in fact, been biding their time to do... something... evil for their own reasons, because they're evil. Did I mention they're evil? Independently and through no fault of the Horde?
They have of course completely abandoned the Horde, because the Horde isn't evil and they are, I guess.
Goblins: Turns out Goblins aren't childlike and ignorant, they're cunning, shrewd, essentially amoral business-folk. Who now sell their blow-self-up services for a fee. That they cannot possibly spend, what with being dead. OK. Furthermore, they're obviously... not evil, but they're certainly not good, which obviously has nothing to do with the fact at they were allied with the Orcs in the previous war. Really, if this is what Goblins are fundamentally like, how did an Orc/Goblin alliance even occur? Not even getting into how inconsistent, generally, it is with everything we saw in Warcraft II.
The important bit here being that the Goblins are definitively not "good guys", and you can't blame this point on the Orcs at all.
They've also broken away from the Horde entirely, just like the Ogres, with just as little justification ie none.
Trolls: Remember the ambiguous, presumably-evil-but-not-necessarily Trolls of Warcraft II I described above? Well, now they're evil, the end, plus the world is covered in myriad sub-varieties of Trolls that are, of course, also always evil, only wait, there's one tribe in the entire world that isn't evil, and of course our newly-heroic Orcs (Who were always heroic, shut up, they were just misunderstood) happened to run across them while traveling to their destination anyway. These Trolls of course promptly joined the Horde for... no described reason... (The demo for Frozen Throne depicts these events, but there's no point at which it makes sense for the Trolls to join therein: they just do. Because) thus abandoning their ancestral homeland for no particular reason. These Trolls are, in turn, conveniently alchemists (Because Trolls in Warcraft II could be upgraded with Regeneration through alchemy invented by Goblins, and I guess Blizzard couldn't bring themselves to actually abandon regenerative Trolls just because the lore says Trolls with no Goblin affiliation shouldn't have it. Never mind how willing they are to retcon much bigger plotpoints), and make references to a Troll Hero from Quel'thalas -who they should never have heard of, what with being on another continent, on the other side of an ocean no one has ever crossed before the Horde does so in Warcraft III.
The fact that these blue-skinned jungle Trolls are cannibals gets referred to, and then the implications of their morality are promptly ignored. Never mind that the Quel'thalas Trolls never did anything more evil than be a part of the Horde in Warcraft II, these new cannibal Trolls are obviously less evil than the forest Trolls we abandoned. Because they joined the New Horde. I guess.
Leaving aside the baffling decision to remove Trolls (Presumably to distance the Horde from their old, evil allies), replace them with different Trolls so we still have Trolls (Thus botching this attempt at distancing the Horde), and then make the new Trolls engage in an activity few people would describe as moral (Thus completely ruining the entire attempt), this is broadly in line with the prior two species -the Quel'thalas Trolls are evil, but it's not the Horde's fault, they were that way before the Horde showed up, honest, come look at our replacement buddies who are considerably more Good. (The Ogres have been replaced with the Tauren, for instance)
Dragons: This is a bit roundabout. The New Horde does not have Dragons. That's fine, since the old Dragons were slaves, and the new Horde isn't into that kind of thing anymore, what with being redeemed and all. They replace them with "Wyverns", which are supposed to be related to Dragons or something, though really the only similarity is that they both fly, and these Wyverns are supposedly all choosing to work with the Horde of their own volition because... who knows why, I don't actually care.
That's all fine. It's much better handled then the other species, honestly.
But...
Warcraft III also decides to heavily retcon Dragons. In Warcraft II, they were basically wild animals that conformed to various Dragon tropes. (No reference to hording gold, actually, but mostly typical otherwise) Older Dragons seemed to be intelligent, going by the mother-Dragon as well as Deathwing's presence in Beyond the Dark Portal, but overall Dragons seemed to be animals that happened to be particularly dangerous -sort of like a real-world big predator, only moreso. In Warcraft III, they are instead pretty much angels. The beings that built the world constructed them and set them to the task of keeping the order of the world, and that's what they do, with the old mother-Dragon being revealed to be basically a goddess, sacred to a large fraction of Dragon-kind and hideously powerful in her own right, far beyond what being a big fire-breathing reptile would suggest.
There is no backlash for the Horde's crimes against Dragons. "Yeah we kidnapped God/the pope/Buddha/name a holy or divine figure you prefer and turned them into a baby factory so we could use the kids as child-soldier-slaves, and nobody cares." What?
This is the part that bothers me about Dragons, in relation to the Horde. The story ignores the entire thing and lets the Horde off scot-free. Never mind that the Dragons are not forgiving sorts. Never mind that it is well within Momma Dragon's capabilities to torch every Orc alive. Never mind all her children that would be outraged on her behalf, and demand payment in blood. Never mind that Orcs come from an entirely different world, so whatever divine mandates about not hurting the two-legs wouldn't apply because Orcs aren't from the world she and all other Dragons are here to protect, and in fact they tried to kill everyone in it, and were working for the Burning Legion -that is, the people the Dragons are meant to protect this world from, so in addition to the personal grievances she should have with the Orcs her duty should compel her to do something about them.
But no, the Orcs are Good now, so none of the terrible things they did in Warcraft II will have any consequences.
But let's talk about the Orcs themselves for a second!
Orcs: Remember how I talked about the whole "let's genocide everything for fun" thing? How it happened well before the Orcs made any demonic deals? Yeah, not anymore. Now the Orcs were peaceful tribes who were One With Nature before the demons talked to them, at which point their leaders accepted a deal involving drinking Demon blood to turn all Orcs everywhere into bloodthirsty maniacs, leading to them purging various other species in the world. You see, the Orcs aren't evil, they were possessed by outside forces! They'd have gone right on being peaceful hippies until the end of time if it weren't for demonic influence that they invited into their homes and accepted wholeheartedly. Because the Orcs are good, you see. Honest.
This is all kinds of retcons, but my real issue is that the Horde is supposed to be undergoing a redemption arc -they turned evil, it was bad, and now
The Point
Warcraft III can't be bothered to cope with any of the consequences of the Horde's actions. Their old allies have gone from being maybe-evil people who are tools of the Orcs, to being evil on their own, no Orc influence at all, honest. The Dragon enslavement thing is being completely ignored, never mind how tremendous the consequences should be. The fact that they butchered their way through much of humanity on one continent and then followed the remainder to another so they could kill everyone there -oh, well, you see... humans are mostly jerks now, as are all the other Alliance members in all honestly, the Horde has a divine mandate from Medivh (He Who Protects Creation -don't think too much about how he's redundant with the Dragons, because Blizzard sure didn't) to promptly run away to a new continent nobody even knows exists. Yeah, there's humans and so on here too, but once they get over their prejudices they ally with the Orcs against the larger threat of demonic invasion, instantly forgiving the whole "genocide" thing.
So the Orcs don't redeem themselves. They just are declared "Good" by the plot and then shuffled off away from everything terrible they did. Bunches of things they could be blamed for -maybe the Ogre's aren't evil, just oblivious?- is not their fault via ludicrous retcon, while other things are just quietly ignored, never to be addressed. This would have been an awesome opportunity to develop the world, but instead the game shoves everything that could hurt the new image of Squeaky Clean Good Guy Orcs into a corner and pretends you can't see it.
I find this a baffling way to handle the whole thing. If you want the bad guys to become good guys, you don't do that by saying they never were bad guys and ignoring the social fallout of their Bad Guy actions. The whole point of running through a redemption arc is that they did bad things, are willing to own up to their actions, and are willing to make changes to become good people. If you strip out the consequences it loses all its weight, and Good Guys who were never bad to begin with and don't need to fear consequences for bad behavior work better if you just invent some new people who were, I dunno, never bad guys.
Why do a redemption arc where no redemption occurs?
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